Baker's Chocolate is one of the most famous chocolate brands in the country, though it is not the kind of chocolate bar that you pick up for a snack. Just like its name implies, almost all of Baker's Chocolate is used for baking. This means that it is a product that is often tossed into a shopping basket without a thought, when it turns out that it is one of the most interesting things on the shelf.
The business began in 1765, when Dr. James Baker went into the chocolate making business with a young man named John Hannon. They formed the Baker's Chocolate Company in 1780 and the company has been doing business ever since, making it America's oldest chocolate company. Their chocolate was also one of the country's first packaged and branded products that were nationally available, as many other goods did not travel or store well.
Originally, their product was primarily used for making sweetened chocolate drinks, grating the solid chocolate into hot water. In 1870, the company came out with their first baking booklet, which was 12 pages long and given away with many products. From that book sprang numerous other recipes and baking books and culminated in a collection of one-bowl recipes that made the chocolate well-known to time-pressed home chefs in the 1990s, over 200 years after the company began production.
The most famous recipe to originate from Baker's is the German Chocolate Cake, which gets its name because it was originally made with Baker's German's Sweet Chocolate, a sweetened baking chocolate that was invented by an employee named Sam German in 1852. The cake, however, was invented in 1957 by a woman in Texas, who christened the cake after the chocolate.
The company is now owned by Kraft, after a century of family ownership and a few other sales, but they still produce a chocolate that is a household staple and a welcome addition to any homemade chocolaty treat. Their chocolate varieties include unsweetened, bittersweet, semi-sweet, German's sweet and white chocolate baking squares, in addition to a wide range of other baking essentials
7-20-2006 @9:26AM Rhea said... I live in Boston, just a few miles from the erstwhile Baker's Chocolate factory in Dorchester. There is a man in town who gives occasional lectures on the history of the company. Here is some info on him and the chocolate company. http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=1180
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7-20-2006 @10:15AM Angela Pitt said... I use Bakers chocolate quite a lot when I'm baking.
I've never had a disappointing result in my baked goods with it.
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7-20-2006 @11:04AM Jennifer said... I had no idea about the origin of German Chocolate Cake - one of my childhood favorites. Interesting.
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